


Reversals

by haveloved



Category: Home Fires (UK TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 16:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7625983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haveloved/pseuds/haveloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When he can breathe again, or whatever that means these days, Will lowers himself to sit on the hard ground, using the headstone as leverage. He drops the cane beside him and closes his eyes, because he doesn’t have to read the engraving. He knows the words as surely as he knows that soon, sooner than he’d like, there will be more underneath them, a summation of his own life.</i>
</p><p>Spoilers for 2x06. An imagining of what could have come after for the Campbells.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reversals

**Author's Note:**

> We'll never know now what would have happened after the plane crash, and as a result I found myself considering all possible scenarios, even the most unlikely. What happens when the death you were expecting comes, but not to you?
> 
> I don't own these characters or the brilliance that was Home Fires. Everything belongs to Simon Block. Hopefully he would not have done to them what I have.
> 
> This one is for my father. I owe the piece of me that now loves history, the piece of me that drew me to this show, to him. I love and miss you every day.

He pushes from his mind just how long it’s taking him to pick his way through even the small village cemetery. He tells himself it’s the cane slowing his progress even when he knows the cane can only go as fast as he can move it, that summoning the effort, the breath, to move his body through each day is only getting harder.

His breaths wheeze out rhythmically with each muffled thump of the cane’s bottom into the earth. Each wheeze makes his lungs burn a little more, the cold air exacerbating the already-constant pain of breathing. Snow hasn’t fallen yet this winter. The knowledge it will come any day had been what had gotten him out of bed and onto such an arduous trek. Once the snow falls, it will be too hard, too painful, for him to leave the house often. Laura already worries constantly about the possibility of him stumbling while using the cane; certainly she won’t want him going out on slick pavement. She worries that much, and that’s without knowing (though maybe she does) how much it hurts him to even breathe.

Maybe she does know. Will lets himself dwell on that thought. Maybe she does know, just a little. The constant ache in his chest isn’t entirely from the cancer.

He has to catch himself on the headstone when he reaches it, has to stand there bent double, his wheezes turned to sharp gasps of pain. He’d walked somewhat quicker than he should have the last few yards. Had he kept at the same pace he’d been going, he might have been tempted to slow his steps and eventually turn before he reached his wife’s grave.

Tempted, maybe, but in his aching heart he knows it would have been just that. A temptation. He can’t give up what time he has left with his wife. Not when the time she was supposed to have spent with him before he died, before his shuffling off the mortal bloody coil, had been taken from her.

When he can breathe again, or whatever that means these days, Will lowers himself to sit on the hard ground, using the headstone as leverage. He drops the cane beside him and closes his eyes, because he doesn’t have to read the engraving. He knows the words as surely as he knows that soon, sooner than he’d like, there will be more underneath them, a summation of his own life.

 _ERICA CAMPBELL_  
**_2 ndDecember 1892 – 7th September 1940  
_ ** **_Loving wife and mother_ **

It hurts less to breathe. He had noticed that, the times he’d come before this. Despite the effort it takes to get himself here, physically and mentally, he breathes easier in his wife’s presence. He breathes easier despite continually reminding himself that of the two of them, she was the one who wasn’t supposed to be here.

When he finally opens his eyes, they land not on the engraving but on the white lilies resting in front of the headstone. Laura’s doing—they must be; while he knows all the women of the WI have come around, such a gesture would be down to his daughter’s thinking of it. Laura has a good heart, always has. It was why he’d never found it in his to be too angry with her about that business with the wretched Wing Commander. A youthful mistake had been all it was, one to learn from.

Youth. A funny thought. He reaches out and lets his fingers trace over the engraving. Erica had been two years his senior; maybe in the end, in another life, she would have been the first to go after all. If it hadn’t been for his lungs, for the bloody goddamn plane, for her assisting him during the delivery—

(He stops himself from carrying that thought further. Miriam is grieving nearly as much as he is. Had it not been entirely illogical for her to apologize for going into labor, he’s sure she would have already.)

Youth. He’d been so young and cocksure meeting Erica, back in the RAMC. They’d married even quicker than Jack and Kate had, eloped during his leave, had had mercifully little time to wait until the war had ended, he’d been demobbed, and they’d been able together. His parents had cared little what he did so long as he was happy, but hers had been another story. They’d been so sure at first a hasty marriage only a week after they’d first met was the same youthful mistake Laura had made, the mistake he and Erica had wondered if Kate was making with Jack.

Youth. Where had it gotten him now? Where had growing older gotten him if he was dying at just forty-six? It isn’t all that young, these days—there are boys younger than Laura being blown to bits; there are boys much less lucky than David Brindsley—but it’s younger than he’d ever envisioned himself dying, after the worst had been over at Flanders. Only then had he allowed himself to think of a tomorrow, of a life with Erica, all he’d wanted.

A life with Erica. Precisely what he no longer had.

 

* * *

 

It stings him badly to come home to Laura.

It isn’t resentment that she survived, that Erica hadn't—no, he’s grateful every day that she’d been at the outpost and not in the village when the plane had hit. The resentment he saves for himself.

Rather, what he feels is guilt. Laura should be making a home with a husband her own age, not her dying father. He knows how little time he has left, but at the same time, he fears lingering. He fears Laura losing years of her time caring for him, missing out on the life she could be building with Tom.

But then, he reminds himself even that isn’t a guarantee. Kate had been building a life with Jack.

He appreciates that the house is still being rebuilt, that in the months immediately following losing Erica he hasn’t had to come home to their bedroom, their sitting room, the surgery that wouldn’t have run nearly as smooth without her. There are few things that have made the loss easier to take. His and Laura’s temporary home is one of them.

Laura is laying out the tea things. She nods, when he comes in to the kitchen, to a letter on the table. “Kate wrote.”

He doesn’t believe in God—it’s hard to when you know your efforts alone have been what saved lives, or ended them. Still, the relief he feels every day he knows Kate is still alive, still relatively safe in London despite day after day of air raids, is directed at the heavens.

The letter is addressed solely to him. As he takes his seat and hangs the cane on the back of the chair, he asks nonchalantly, “She wrote to you as well?”

Laura nods. “Read it earlier.”

“Told you to look after me, I assume.”

Laura manages to avoid his gaze by focusing on the floor as she brings the teapot to the table. “Is it so bad if she did? Not that she had to tell me...”

“You know how I feel about you looking after me. The both of you.”

“Would you have been saying this to Mum?”

She has him there, he supposes. He’d never rejected Erica’s efforts to care for him—he’d relied on her, rather. He’d been too cavalier, too liable to work at his regular pace during the radiation therapy, driving himself almost to collapse. It had been Erica making him rest, Erica managing the schedule of the surgery to take some of the weight off his shoulders.

Erica had been the only one he’d wanted with him at the eventual end. He’d told only her, hadn’t wanted the girls to know, had wanted to spare them the pain and anxiety of watching his decline until they absolutely had to. He’d known Erica could handle it, that she’d want to. They’d promised each other in sickness and in health. Kate and Laura hadn’t had that responsibility. He hadn’t wanted them to.

Laura seems satisfied by his silence as she pours the tea. She’s learned by now how to win their arguments. He knows as well as she does, better even, what Erica would have wanted. An occasional reminder serves him well.

He decides to leave the letter for later. He knows Kate writes to Laura for news of him, just as Laura knows Kate writes him to commiserate about patients lost, about the exhaustion and stress of nursing. More than anything he’s proud of her for enduring it, especially these days.

“How was Tom?” She’d gone out when he had. It had taken time, but she’d stopped feeling guilty for living her life after the crash.

“Doing well. He wants to take me out on Saturday. I said I’d—”

“You don’t need my permission, I’ve told you that.”

She nods, slowly. She doesn’t seem to want to ask where he’d gone; she already knows the answer. After a few sips of the tea he decides to relieve her of the burden. “The flowers you left are beautiful. Your mother’s favorites.”

“From the greenhouse.” Laura picks at the sleeve of her jumper. “Know they’ll freeze out there soon. Thought I’d give her something while the weather held.”

He thinks again about the prospect of snow, of staying shuttered in their sparse, lonely home except for the occasions he can’t avoid going out. He thinks about not being able to visit his wife, to do as he and Laura have started doing recently, taking brief walks around the village, just as he and Erica sometimes had.

The tea soothes his throat after the cold air’s making it ache, and he watches Laura as she runs her finger round the rim of the chipped cup. Laura, younger than Kate and always a little freer, louder. Laura, now more worn down than he’d thought she’d ever be, mistress of a temporary home with her ailing father.

He drains his cup, gets to his feet by pressing one of his palms flat against the table and pulling himself up. Laura starts to stand to help him, but he leans in and kisses her head before he says, “You might think about calling Tom—have him round for dinner. Tonight, if you’d like. Must beat sitting here with just your wheezy old man for conversation.”

He thinks he sees the faintest smile on Laura’s lips at his self-deprecation. She nods and says a quiet _yes_ , and his reward is the wider smile she gives him as he leaves the kitchen carrying the cane and Kate’s letter.

 

* * *

 

Undressing some relieves him of the weight of his suit jacket, the vague constriction of his tie around his throat. His socks and shoes he stows under the bed. He’d always preferred sleeping with socks off, but Erica had always murmured protests at his cold feet and he’d gotten used to keeping them on. A decades-old habit is a hard one to break, but then, he doesn’t have to take her into account anymore. 

Kate’s letter he opens slowly. He wants the news his daughter is doing well as much as he wants anything, but he knows already the burden he’ll face writing back. It will take effort to write as though he and Laura are perfectly happy, as though he’s not constantly worried about their dwindling savings now the surgery’s gone, as though he doesn’t know she’s reading between every line for the actuality.

The letter spans several days, written in brief snatches before lights out and during her daily breaks. It holds the expected remembrances of lost patients, the reassurance she’s bearing up despite the grind of the routine.

At the end is something he hadn’t expected, an acknowledgement of something they’ve only ever talked about in person.

_I’d love if you could visit Jack next time you go to see Mum. I hate to think he misses me coming by. I’d say give my love to him and Mum but they already have it, every day. You and Laura, as well. I’ll be home my next leave. All my love, Kate._

There is, then, at least one thing he can be honest about when he writes back. She never had to ask. He visits his son-in-law each time he goes to see his wife, because he’d known without her asking him to that it was what Kate would want, because despite his reservations about the match at first, all Jack had done was make Kate happy.

If there had been mercy in anything, it had been in his being unconscious in hospital after the accident. The news about Erica had been broken to him by a barely composed Laura, and he hadn’t resented the tears she’d dissolved into immediately after—he’d welcomed them, rather, even as he’d held her in his arms. He’d gotten the news from Laura, from someone dearest in the world to him, rather than an impersonal visit from an official, as Kate had gotten. The shock, for him, had been numbed by a head injury sustained from falling debris, by the sheer unfathomable nature of how it had happened—a ruddy plane crashing into the surgery, when Great Paxford was miles from anything, nowhere anyone would ever have thought it could happen. His grief had been muted at first, nothing like Kate’s agonized wails that day on the staircase, her dazed wanderings to the cottage.

Kate had gotten the barest leave for the funeral, three days, two for travel and one in between, the day of. She and Laura seemed to have made a pact to be cheerful, solicitous, the same way they had after the wretched night in the air raid shelter when his plans to keep his illness from them had crumbled to dust. Laura had been bringing him a cup of tea before bed each night, but it was Kate who took it upon herself the night they’d laid Erica to rest, Kate who knocked and found his bedroom door open.

After handing him the cup and saucer she’d sat on the side of the bed that had been her mother’s. She’d kept her eyes straight ahead as he drank, seemingly knowing not to stare—perhaps because of how he’d told her and Laura how such solicitude unnerved him, that one morning. When he’d set the cup and saucer down on his nightstand, she’d finally spoke.

“Felt like I’d already spent a lifetime with Jack, when it happened. It felt like it, and it had only been a few months. I’d thought… I’d thought we’d get as long as you and Mum had, at least. I can’t imagine… losing that, after all that time.”

He’d covered the hand resting nearest his with his own, causing her to meet his gaze. There were things he’d once never been able to imagine. Losing Erica had been one. Seeing either of his daughters widowed had been another, despite knowing exactly what times they were living in—times he and Erica had wished desperately to be over, having lived that uncertainty already.

“I was never afraid of dying.” The shock that had entered her gaze hadn’t surprised him, and he’d shaken his head. “Not once. I stopped being afraid of it in Flanders. Once you give up that fear, you don’t get it back. What I _was_ afraid of was—what would happen to the three of you after I was gone. Had I made the right choices, would you all be provided for… would you think less of me, if I’d failed—”

“You  haven’t.” Kate had said that quickly, then repeated, more forcefully, “Dad, you haven’t. Don’t start with anything like that. We’ll be fine, Laura and me. Mum—” A breath, shaky. “Mum wouldn’t want you doubting yourself.”

He had stopped himself only because she’d asked, because he’d known the faith she and Laura had in him, because he couldn’t fail them any more than he already had, with his illness. “It was supposed to be me, out of all of us—not Jack, not your mother. I’m sorry it wasn’t. More than I can say.”

“Don’t say that. I wish Mum was still here, for you, for all of us—but the extra time you got from the radiation… I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’m—I’m glad we didn’t lose you, too. Not yet.”

She may have promised Laura to be cheerful, but they’d been alone, and the façade had cracked just slightly. He hadn’t been sure exactly what she was crying for most—Jack, her mother, or the certainty that she’ll soon be burying him, too.

He hadn’t been sure, but he’d known his embrace could help.

He sets Kate’s letter aside and closes his eyes, his thoughts lingering on the many injustices of wartime. Kate having to bury Jack barely a few months after the wedding. Both of his daughters having to stand alongside him as his wife, their mother, was buried. Most of all, that it was bloody cancer that was killing him, at a time when so many other things could.

 

* * *

 

A part of him knows he’s sleeping. 

A part of him knows he should be awake, that Laura had knocked earlier and told him Tom would be coming for dinner. A part of him is stirring, but that part is being silenced by the rest of him—the rest of him wants to stay in the dream.

The dream of Erica smoothing back his hair, kissing his temple, sitting on her side of the bed. Her eyes stray to the chair his cane is hanging on. “See you’ve finally taken my advice.”

“No arm of yours to lean on, I’m afraid, so I had to.” His smile falters even in a dream such as this, a dream of what he wants more than anything. Because even in a dream of her beside him, he can’t escape the reality. “It’s for Laura’s sake. She worries I’ll get too out of breath to walk unsupported. Can’t bear to have her look at me the way she was. The way you did, when you worried.”

“If you think I don’t worry any longer—”

“You won’t have to, when I join you. Which should be soon enough, I’d say.”

“And after all that talk you gave the girls about new treatments coming through every day. It’s disappointing, Will.”

“And wasn’t I always?”

“Never.” He supposes it’s his imagination—all of this is—but the fierceness in her voice… no, that was all Erica. “You can’t just quit on the girls.”

“Don’t think I have much say in that, when the tumor’s the one deciding.”

“Kate got you to try radiation. It made you better.”

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily, then, but eventually, if there’s something permanent—”

“I won’t be alive to see it, I’m sure.” It comes out sharper than he wants it to. “The talk I gave Kate and Laura the day I told them was just that, Erica. Talk. They didn’t need to hear it was hopeless. I trusted you to understand what they shouldn’t have to.”

“And I did. When it was you and me. When I thought I’d be the one taking care of them.”

“And you’re not any longer. You don’t have to tell me. It’s crystal bloody clear it’s down to me now, however long that lasts.”

Maybe there’s no response to that—maybe she’s silent because he knows he’s having this argument with himself. It’s been the constant susurration at the back of his mind, and he’s never had an answer for himself. Why would _she_ have one for him, when she’s not even here?

Maybe in the end, when he dreams her fingers stroking through his hair again just as they always had—as they had the day he’d slipped in the surgery, as they had the day they’d learned the radiation therapy had been somewhat of a success—it’s because it’s what he’s missed, what he _needs_ more than anything.

“You should be here,” he whispers, his eyes closed, his voice cracked.

“But I’m not,” she whispers back, her voice as soft as her lips as they graze his forehead.

He can feel his breaths coming harder than usual, a fight for control he doesn’t want to have anymore. “I said _when I join you_ , just before. I don’t know why I said it—you know it’s not what I believe… the body, it—it dies, it decays, there’s nothing else… there’s nothing else for _us_ … I don’t know why I think you’re here, when I know that…”

“Because it’s what you need, Will. Someone to talk to.”

“And who do you suggest? Because if you think I’m going to talk to a bloody stone—”

“What do you think this has always been about? The girls, Will. They can handle more than you give them credit for. They know you’re not getting better. If you’re so bloody convinced you don’t have to try any longer, that you’re dying, then don’t protect them from that. I can’t help you. They can.”

“They shouldn’t have to.”

“And who’s been saying that all along? You. You don’t get to decide for them. They’re grown. You can’t protect them—especially not now. I know why you want to; I’ve always loved you for it… but this isn’t a time for illusions, Will. Not even this one.”

He opens his eyes, grateful to see her face, grateful he won’t live long enough for the memories of her to start fading, jumbling into each other. He won’t forget her smile, the way it had made him feel to watch her with the girls or at her desk in the surgery, to see her living so joyously in the life they’d made…

And then he opens his eyes for real.

There are tears staining his face and wetting the pillow, tears he hadn’t realized are mingling with his breaths, labored not from the tumor but from missing her. He’s been numb for so long that it’s suddenly a relief not to be.

It’s such a luxury that he finds himself giving way to a strangled sob, then another, as he covers his face with his hand, the warm metal of his wedding band digging into the bridge of his nose the only sensation he cares to feel beyond the tide of grief.

And then there’s another—Laura’s hands grasping his forearm frantically, squeezing tight. “Dad? _Dad?_ ”

He tries to collect himself—tries, because he can’t quite manage it—and Laura’s voice is even more frantic now. “Are you in pain? Can you breathe?”

“Yes.” He manages the one word, just barely, though he realizes that he _can_ breathe doesn’t necessarily mean he _wants_ to.

He feels Laura sit heavily on the end of the bed, quiet as she gives him time to gather himself, and he does, taking his hand from over his eyes and drying his face with the handkerchief resting on his end table. When his eyes have cleared he realizes Laura is shaking, and it suddenly strikes him the terror she must live in. How afraid must she be of a day she might enter his room and find him entirely still?

He pushes the covers away and moves to the edge of the mattress, rests his feet on the floor and moves closer to her. The hand that lands on her trembling shoulder squeezes. “I had a dream about your mother. Caught me off guard.”

“I think I hear her calling for me in the morning sometimes.” Laura’s smile is watery. “Like she did the first few weeks after I joined the WAAF, do you remember?”

“Vividly. You never were an early bird.” He reaches up to tuck a loose curl back over her ear. “Tom is here; you came to wake me?”

“I can tell him you’re not well—”

“No, not at all. Give me a few minutes to get myself sorted and I’ll be down.”

Laura nods, and his anxiety for her welfare fades into relief as her trembling subsides. “What you said earlier—you were right. I didn’t tell your mother not to look after me, and I shouldn’t be telling you girls any differently. What I want is for you not to lose yourself in it—not to hold yourself back because you think I need you more than someone else does. It isn’t true, and I’d hate to think of doing that to you or to Kate. I’ll learn not to resist if you give me time. Because I do think I have some time. Is that fair?”

“Perfectly.” He’d hoped to see her smile again today, and once more, when she does, it feels like a reward. “And you’ll tell the same to Kate?”

“Yes. And in a day or two I’ll hardly remember which of you I told in the first place.”

“ _Wrong daughter_ ,” Laura laughs faintly, so much like Erica had when she’d told him the same every time over the years.

She moves to get up, but suddenly, before she does, she turns and wraps her arms around his waist, tighter than she ever has. He lets his hands climb her back and stroke softly through her curls, a comfort he hopes she’ll remember when memories of him are all she has.

She breaks from him with a soft murmur about seeing him downstairs in a few minutes and leaves the room, closing the door behind her. He eases onto his feet and retrieves his shirt and trousers from the chair he’d left them on, to pull them back on over his vest and briefs.

He remembers Erica’s smoothing down his shirtfront the morning of Kate’s wedding, fixing his lapels. He’d known he’d remember the sight of her in that floral dress as well as he remembered his first seeing her in the dress Kate was now wearing, and he’d murmured as much in her ear only to be told that if he said it again, she wouldn’t be wearing the dress for much longer…

No more illusions. Even if every logical part of him knows it hadn’t been his wife telling him that, merely a phantasm conjured up by his unconscious mind, he knows the truth of it. He can carry with him the memories of her, but he can’t live in them.

And somehow, having resolved to carry her in his heart, it doesn’t feel like she’s gone at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Simon Block has refused to reveal who would have survived the plane crash and who would not have, in case the show does eventually continue. He did, however, say that with Will's illness, there is a limit to how long he could credibly have survived. To me, this indicated that the crash would not have killed Will, that we would have seen him survive only to eventually decline and pass away.
> 
> I found myself imagining the worst the more I thought about it. Will never seemed all that afraid to die, just about what would happen to Erica and the girls after his passing. But what would have happened if death had come not for him, dying already of cancer, but for Erica? How would it affect his relationship to the girls, now that the burden on him has multiplied? How would it affect his view of himself, already compromised by terminal illness, when his wife predeceased him due to a freak accident? I've tried grappling with these questions and can only hope I've scratched the surface of the answers.
> 
> I owe several thanks. First, foremost, and always, to Cait, who read this even not knowing the fandom beyond my crazed ramblings and who offered her support as I wrote it despite making sure I knew it was the saddest, most twisted idea ever. Second, to the absolutely stunning portrayers of the Campbells on screen—Ed Stoppard, Frances Grey, Rachel Hurd-Wood, and Leila Mimmack. Their vivid performances made writing something so emotional and difficult feel effortless, because I felt like I knew the characters exactly. Third, to Simon Block for creating Great Paxford and all its citizens, no matter how much I hate their being ripped from us so soon. (Also, I must thank him for having Will swear, after I spent a couple hours agonizing over whether or not he would only to remember “bloody beer glass.”)
> 
> Any errors in chronology or anachronisms are my own. Will having served in Flanders during WWI comes from an interview Ed Stoppard gave prior to Series 1.
> 
> I do hope anyone who's bothered to have read this far enjoyed the piece. This fandom is a wonderful place and I thank you all.


End file.
